#890 1/21/18 – This Week: A Letter To The Editor – Well Said!

This Week:  A Letter To The Editor – Well, Said!

Long-time Philly community Israel-advocate Arthur Rabin wrote the following letter this week to an editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, saying in calm, clear words what needed to be said.  With Arthur’s permission, here’s what he said:

January 16, 2018

Brian Leighton, Deputy Managing Editor, Editing & Standards, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Dear Mr. Leighton:

I realize that the story, “White House may cut Palestinian refugee aid on page A9 Monday [1/15/18] was an Associated Press piece and not generated by the Inquirer’s staff.  But I feel that the paper should have had some input to correct and clarify distorted and incomplete information, either on the same page, prominently elsewhere in the same issue on in a follow-up.

In this case, the article referred to “5 million refugees and their descendants.”  I know that the 5 million includes the descendants.  But many readers, perhaps most, would actually absorb it as plus [emphasis original] their descendants.  There were about six or seven hundred thousand refugees from the 1948 war.  There are probably less than 30,000 elderly actual refugees still around.  The rest are multiple generations of descendants.

Also important, the article does not explain that the United Nations has two [emphasis original] refugee programs:  UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) and UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East).

Whereas UNHCR has aided and resettled millions of refugees in Europe, Asia and Africa as designed, UNRWA was designed and used to perpetuate and expand this particular refugee status.  That’s where we get the 5 million figure.  The aim was and is to continue to pressure and demonize Israel, and eventually to destroy it.

I ask that the Inquirer give equal prominence to the above clarifications.

Thank you for your attention.

Arthur Rabin

Long-time readers of this media watch may recall the many exchanges we had with the Inquirer in the years 2001-03 regarding public understanding of the routinely used AP-et-ilk expression “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” (emphasis added).  And we quoted in this media watch Katz’s important work Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine citing authorities that the actual number of Arabs who left what became tiny Israel in 1948 was well less than 500,000.  Indeed, an INN article yesterday, “How Many Arab Refugees Were There in 1948?  Maybe 300,000 or Less,” claims that “the true figure is much lower, possibly as low as 270,000.”   This is far fewer than the Jewish refugees from Arab and other Muslim lands in the wake of the 1948 (Arab invasion-started) war whom Israel absorbed, about whom Western publics are little-informed.

UNRWA has been much in the news because President Trump has just reduced funding by the U.S., the largest donor, to it.  I’d long worried that if this should happen, European diplomats would injure themselves colliding at the podium of the U.N. pledging replacement contributions.  Indeed, this is already occurring:  JPost today: “Belgium, Netherlands To Supplement UNRWA Funds Cut By U.S.”

That JPost article noted:

“UNRWA’s definition of a refugee extends to descendants of the people who fled.  The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which is responsible for aiding all other refugees in the world [emphasis added], only recognizes as refugees those who themselves fled persecution, conflict or disaster zones.”

So Where Do We Come Out?

There are two issues here.  One regards UNRWA, with its inflammatory school books and other perpetuations of Arab rejection of Israel, and the other, rightly raised by Inquirer reader Rabin in his letter to an Inq editor this week, regards the obligation of an American city newspaper to provide readers balanced information on international news stories not covered in a balanced manner in wire service news articles the paper chooses to print.

[a]  As regards UNRWA, the focus this week of welcome international attention thanks to the U.S. reducing its contribution, Israel advocates armed with documented details of its maligning of Israel can present this detailed information to American political leaders, encouraging them to work toward ending this perpetual poisoning of Arabs’ and others’ perception of the Jewish homeland of Israel.  “Hot off the presses” is a “shocking comprehensive study,” available in Hebrew and English, “Schoolbooks of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and UNRWA: Attitudes to the Jews, to Israel, and to Peace.”  The ad’s in the other email I’m sending this week, offering books from sources including my private collection of about a thousand on Jewish history.

Abbas has been shooting his mouth off this week that Israel is a “colonialist project,” not the three-millennia homeland of Jews.  One book documenting, and I like to think bringing to life, that three-millennia homeland history is my Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine  (Pavilion Press, 2011) on Amazon.  Also in that other email this week.

[b]  As regards an American city newpaper’s obligation to provide readers balanced presentation of international news, two problems facing readers, worrisome to democracy, are the dearth today of American city newspapers and of the international news services that they use.  The growing Israeli news source Tazpit (TPS) would be a welcome second source of Israel news in, e.g., an Inquirer serving as essentially the only international news-carrying paper in an American city the size of Philadelphia.  The danger to democracy, though, is the base problem that an American city the size of Philadelphia doesn’t have, toe-to-toe with the Inq, a second daily broadsheet with a more conservative bent.  Those among the aggrieved with resources to address this should use them.